Uplink (video game)

by DMAJ on October 19th, 2009

The game Uplink came out in 2001. It’s a simulate hacking à la ‘Hackers’ (1995) variety.

The game was written on a Windows 2000 platform, and supports Vista 64-bit and WinXP 32-bit. Although I know there is a Mac port of the game, and that it supports other OSes, those are the only two I run and so the only two I tested it on.

Back in the day, Doom was all the rage, I remember an Aliens mod (*.wad files) that completely overwrote the game experience, making it a whole new game. I was really impressed with what the modding community could do, and am glad Uplink supports this kind of programming, this game (like Doom) supports home-brew mods.

A FBI mod is popular, and I personally like the fixes Simply Uplink has to offer. I am very impressed that Introversion decided to stay this course. Another company was licensed to sell Uplink, branded as Uplink: Elite Hacker, and they went to the trouble to muck around with the code so as not to support mods, hence it is recommended to avoid that version. I run a v1.3 patch, the higher ones seems to muck around with my WinXP install, too bad too as some v1.32 changes included saving you connection path (many mouse clicks as the youtube version will show you.

Download link seems to be here. Although the game is not expensive, and so if you find you are having a blast, a donation to the writers … and so.

Onlink is an offshoot, written from the ground up.

The place I got my mods for the game was from Modlink. I went with Darkness (3.81 MB) theme (although Deus Ex (858.8 KB) is good, too). Some extra gateways were available for the theme, Darkness Gateways (239.88 KB). FBI (1.85 MB) changes gameplay somewhat and adds a new LAN software (HUD_VDPINView). As I mentioned earlier, if you just want to play the base game, but want some annoyances removed Simply Uplink (644.8 KB) is an awesome choice. An nice update to the Map is antiproanti’s The World Map (390.88 KB).

As a side note, I played Deus Ex: Invisible War on the Xbox, good game, but that there is a Deus Ex modding community I am interested in seeing what they’ve done for PC platform.